CrazyTalk 4.5 Review

A few months ago Reallusion released version 4.5 of
CrazyTalk. If you attended SIGGRAPH you may have had the chance to
play with it, but if you didn't and you are a CrazyTalk fan, this
article might interest you. If you don't know what CrazyTalk is,
you may also read on so you know more about it.

CrazyTalk is a very simple software that lets you create
"animated talking avatars". It ships with some premade
models you can use for your own projects but you can also create
your own from any photo that may be lying around in your hard
drive. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that CrazyTalk
yields the best results if the faces are facing the camera, or
slightly rotated (you can't make your avatar out of a profile
face). These avatars can be used for greeting cards, websites,
videos, or anything you want.

The first step is to load the picture you want to use. You have
"setup zones" that you use to define your character's
features so crazy talk knows the location of the mouth,
the eyes, and so on. There are 3 fitting settings for your face.
The higher the level, the more control points you have to better
outline your character's features (the image above shows level
two). You can also change your avatar's background for anything
else if you want. In the end you will end up with a fully
animatable face.

Sometimes you are using characters with closed lips. This can
pose a problem because when they open their mouth, they have no
teeth. This is not a problem at all for CrazyTalk, though, since it
offers the ability to add virtual teeth and even eyes to your
avatars. Teeth can be considered more like a necessary aesthetic
feature, but the eye replacement is very useful if you want to
animate your character's line of sight.

The next step is to import your audio. You can either open a WAV
file or record your voice directly within CrazyTalk. If you have
"text-to-speech" drivers you can also use those. I tried
the latter option, but it didn't work quite well for me since the
text I was testing was in spanish. English text should not be a
problem, though.

After CrazyTalk has analyzed your audio, it will animate your
character to make it talk according to that audio. If you feel like
taking your animation to the next level, you can dive into the
Timeline and keyframe animate facial expressions, head rotations,
and eye movement. CrazyTalk includes a very large facial expression
library so you can easily make your character go from angry to sad
and then happy with a few mouse clicks. By doing this you can be
sure that your character's face will actually reflect the emotions
in your audio file.

In the timeline you can also add animated effects to make the
final animation even better. For example, if you are sending an
animated love letter you can add cupids flying around, or if you
are sad you can add a rainy cloud. The best thing is that adding
these effects is just as simple as adding the facial emotions. The
resulting animation can be exported in a wide variety of formats
depending on what you want to do with it.

The only thing that I found confusing at first is the fact that
I didn't find a way to actually "save" my projects. In
CrazyTalk you save your custom models to the Models
library and the animations in your Scripts library.
Although I thought that was not so convenient since we are all used
to the "save project" and "load project"
methods, I figured this offered easy access to all your data.

Something I would like to see in the future is the ability to
exchange data with major 3D packages. You can exchange data between
CrazyTalk and iClone, but what if you were able to export the
facial animation (or facial rig) from CrazyTalk to Maya or MAX. It
would be cool if you could make the facial animation in CrazyTalk
and then export it to your 3D character in Maya using the FBX
format (actually iClone Studio Pro will be able to exchange data
with Maya via the FBX format). After all what matters is the
result, not how you got there, and that would really save us
animators a lot of time and work.

I had never used CrazyTalk before, so I can't talk about what's
new in CrazyTalk 4.5, nor I can tell you what features may have
been missing. However, I can share my impressions on the software.
CrazyTalk, as well as iClone, is designed to bring the animation to
the non-professional users. If you were to do the same in Maya, for
example, you'd have to model your face, sculpt your facial
expressions, and then keyframe animate your mouth and
expressions. This would translate into days or weeks of work.
CrazyTalk lets you get results easily without going through the
technical side of things. If you want an easy way to create
animated avatars, you may find CrazyTalk to be the right
choice.

Do you iClone? Be sure to check out this iClone
movie made by real-life magician, Steve Draun.

All supporting images are copyright, and
cannot be
copied, printed, or reproduced in any manner without written
permission.

Animation
Alley is a regular featured column with Renderosity Staff
Columnist Sergio Rosa
[nemirc]. Sergio discusses on computer graphics software,
animation techniques, and technology. He also hosts interviews with
professionals in the animation and cinematography fields.

Article Comments

Crazy Talk really is a terrific piece of software. It works so well that it is almost mind-blowing! A "must have" addition to any artist's software library.

deemarie ()
posted at 12:00AM Tue, 17 October 2006

Hey Sergio, will the software allow you to animate two characters at the same time. For example having two faces on the same screen and have them carrying on a conversation? Dee-Marie

nemirc ()
posted at 12:00AM Tue, 17 October 2006

Well, not that I know of. You'd have to bring them together in a compositing app. Maybe this should also go into the "feature request" list, specially since iClone does allow you to do that.

deemarie ()
posted at 12:00AM Wed, 18 October 2006

I was thinking it would be fun to "see" someone read my novel :] Create different characters and have them read from the book. Dee-Marie

breno_speno ()
posted at 12:00AM Thu, 19 October 2006

Interesting piece of software but it really takes the art out of animation

Reallusion ()
posted at 12:00AM Thu, 19 October 2006

The art is part of the animation with CrazyTalk :) The tools inside CrazyTalk let you take your artwork from anywhere like fine-art paintings, (a talking Van Gogh!?!)or even any Poser character images can talk. Your art can speak with CrazyTalk, so I think you'll find tools to advance your art with CrazyTalk. If you enjoy the craft of animation, then the emotive modeling and facial animation in CrazyTalk will deliver the fix.

nemirc ()
posted at 12:00AM Fri, 20 October 2006

I think that in the end what matters is the result, not how you get there. We have facial capture rigs, motion capture rigs, laser scanners and whatnot. Those things are just meant to help you work faster.

breno_speno ()
posted at 12:00AM Sat, 11 November 2006

I understand that commercially it's a good solution for demanding deadlines, the industry favours short-cuts. If I was under tight deadlines CrazyTalk would be a solution. But when you talk about art; templates and presets take the "art" out of art. If I want to admire art I look at Alexandr Petrov's work

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